Continental shift

It doesn't matter that none of us knows a single word of Albanian, let alone anything useful about Albanian landscape and mores. In English, Ismail Kadare's novels, Broken April and The File on H, are masterpieces of droll calm. Although twice translated (from Albanian and French), the tone is consistent, a tone in casual harmony with the whole. Meanwhile, underneath this undulating voice remains the story at the core, its strange angled power -the mythological gravity -released and expanded by the voice-as-narrative. How would a Kadare novel read in Albanian? Presumably better still. Surely the precision of the original language produces in a literary work a more precise effect; and yet once the voice fits the subject, as it does with French-English Kadare, anything more is decoration around the strength of the centre.

Certain poets (Pushkin, Mallarmé, Baudelaire) are flattened in translation, whereas poets who are closer to philosophy (Milosz), or specialise in indignation (Mandelstam, Celan) are strong survivors.

The early translations of Mandelstam were double-acts: an American scholar's literal translation is made poetic by WS Merwin. And while on the subject of the well-meaning amateur, we can only marvel at Proust spending all those hours translating Ruskin, a labour of love, for he knew hardly any English. And Stendhal: an admirer of Shakespeare. Yes, but did he have enough English to over-enthuse, as he did over Walter Scott?

When first opening a work in translation there is an extra feeling of anticipation. The reader here is allowed to enter a strange area of the world, where people are similar yet appear to behave differently, and all in a foreign tongue. Mystery has to be interesting. Other questions can come later.

European literature is recognisably different from English-English or American-English. For one thing, it is much less saddled with the good sense of Protestant empiricism that brings with it the decencies, along with a certain plainness. It has been explained how this rarefied commonsense is behind the solid foundations of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, in verifiable results in medicine and engineering, in law and the stability of institutions; and in the novel it has resulted in a stubborn underlying realism. Britain and America have their local Balzacs and Zolas - their main achievement - whereas the Europeans regularly go beyond, extending more readily into speculation, novels of elastic shape and size, to include ideas, comment, over-arching philosophies - invention, the description used as praise by Pope in the introduction to his translation of The Iliad (an introduction so uncompromising it would hardly be possible to publish today).

A novel has the elasticity to do things other forms - biography, epic poetry, histories - cannot. Proust, Kafka, Herman Broch, Musil, and more recently Marguerite Yourcenar, Calvino and Perec - and there are more - are writers concerned as much with invention and speculation as with tracing the usual psychological contours of character. British and American - and Australian - literature have few equivalents. And the difference is often there on the first page with tone, an intellectual freshness, even in translation.

Still more important is the European instinct to circle or actually enter, or at least be in the vicinity of, what may loosely be called myth. The writer may not even be fully conscious of this; it may not be deliberate. The entrails of myth crawl all over Europe, sometimes bringing on forest-darkness, leaving in their wake fairy tales, indelible opera plots, "irrational" warlords. Without the underlying strength of myth, fiction may well be pleasant and interesting, and perhaps even topical, but lacking in depth and so, portability. See Broken April and Michel Tournier's The Erl King

It is only a matter of time in a Russian novel before a sturgeon arrives on a plate, a "fine sturgeon" or a "large sturgeon". It is like the appearance of bicycles in Irish novels, or the dog wagging its tail in every other Tom Roberts painting. The sturgeon makes its entrance on a plate held by an old footman in a greasy shirt. At other times a landlord of an inn brings the fish half cold to a filthy table. At a rundown estate a traveller is ushered into the presence of the impoverished landowner, tucking into a local sturgeon (Gogol). Russian characters have healthy appetites. They've been travelling on bad roads, in badly sprung carriages. In the 1950s, in Adelaide, reading about "black bread" sounded not tasty at all, but peasant-poor, positively wretched; in a Russian novel it coloured the domestic scene - made it extra-foreign. Where else in literature do you find a languid landowner pondering a pleasantly wasted life, while at the same time reaching out, as if for another slice of sturgeon, for some essential, life-saving truth?

The acclaimed translators of the recent translation of Anna Karenina are appropriately a married couple, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In his introduction, Pevear draws attention to an early scene at the railway station, when the watchman is killed: "... several men with frightened faces suddenly ran past. The station master, in a peaked cap of an extraordinary colour, also ran past. Evidently something extraordinary had happened." The repetition of "extraordinary" didn't bother Nabokov. On the contrary. Such looking-twice repetition contributes to the vivid confusion of the scene. But early translators had a horror of repetition, and set about reducing or eliminating it entirely. In this way they resemble present-day editors, who sit with the raised pencil poised, except the translator can go ahead and do it without the author knowing.

In the introduction to their new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, Pevear makes the case for the novel being "essentially comic", conceding that readers may find this "an intolerably whimsical statement". Earlier translations "smoothed over" Dostoevsky's idiosyncratic prose, "removing much of the humour and distinctive voicing of the novel".

The distinctive voice is at the heart of all worthwhile art; to iron out the stray bumps, awkwardnesses, idiosyncrasies is to reduce the greatest writers to the ordinary, everyday. And for what? Here the impulse may have something to do with the sensible, ordered lives of the translators.

Another attraction of European, including Russian, writers: they are not afraid of the bold assertion. So bold and distinctive are these assertions, it's enough to send timid and ordinary minds rushing for the exits. "Oh, that's a generalisation."

What then is to be said of the first sentence of Anna Karenina? "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Surely it's little more than a "generalisation". Timid readers, timid thinkers are more comfortable when bold and distinctive minds are lowered to more digestible levels - via the refuge of relativism. A certain sort of clotted academic can do this. It may feel judicious; that is all.

It's a relief to turn to Balzac and Stendhal: fearless "generalisers"; Canetti, another one. "There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown", is how Canetti begins a subject he had spent many years considering.

The bold assertion coming in at an unexpected angle: it forces the reader to sit up, and either agree or not. It can be as jolting as a slap across the face. A writer sometimes can gain satisfaction only by provoking a duel. By "generalising", these writers throw off an infectious energy. Stendhal is the supreme example, a truly relentless "generaliser" in his novels, journals, letters and speculative writings. It can provide a large part of a writer's tone; in Stendhal's case, it contributes to his informality, which is part of his attractiveness. Tolstoy's short opening sentence on happy/unhappy families sets the tone for the whole novel. The bold assertion of the first sentence can immediately be contested. Isn't he "generalising"? Aren't there exceptions to it? My family isn't like that, etc.

Balzac's novels are littered with "generalisations". They spout volcano-like from the page, producing energy over and above the normal narrative-energy of a novel. One mild example: "Prosperity brings with it an elation that inferior men can never resist." How does he know? Is there sufficient truth in it? Probably it cannot merely be dismissed.

As for Stendhal, "Remind yourself, above all, of this great and immutable truth: all men are cold, mediocre and love to hurt those they believe to be happy." Almost nonchalantly, Stendhal allows no elbow room. "All men are ... above all ... immutable truth." The writer seems to know something we do not, or haven't thought of. It causes us to reach for the mirror, for Stendhal's claim is unsettling. The reader racks his brains for exceptions. And what are we to make of Camus: "Woman, outside of love, is boring, although she doesn't know it."

Many passages in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and even in Montaigne - to mention but three - are flung down in such an emphatic manner, the easiest thing is to retreat and shrug at the "generalisation". In Pascal we find, "Curiosity is only vanity." Montaigne declared something very similar. (European painters are especially fearless: "Unless you've painted grey, you're not a painter." So Cézanne.) Such blanket statements compel the reader rapidly to search around for exceptions; there may well be some - usually are; but they do not necessarily approach the influential truth, the majority experience.

In Europe, in Germany and France especially, there has been a long tradition of maxims, aphorisms and anecdotes; nothing like it exists in English or American culture. (Another "generalisation"). It encouraged the aphoristic style of Stendhal and the others (Kafka, Cioran), which in shifting us made us richer.

Someone should write a book on the subject. It could be called "Sources and Meanings of Generalisations in European Literature, or Translating the Generalisation". A defence of the writers not afraid to "generalise"; the all-too-easy use of that term; a devastating dismantling of the timid response to the boldness of the fresh and original mind. Translated into the main European languages, writers and readers there wouldn't understand what all the fuss was about.

The opening sentence of The Fish Can Sing by Haldor Laxness (translated by Magnus Magnusson): "A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father."

Actually the most glaring examples of "generalisation" are the deep structures of myth, archetypes and certain areas of psychoanalysis. And these planks in our civilisation, not easily dismissed, were realised and tested first in foreign languages, reaching us mostly in translation.

With some translations I can remember where I first read them. In Moscow in winter 1974 it was Montherlant's Chaos and Night. I have no idea why I have remembered. In London in a basement flat, surrounded by dented rubbish bins in the early 1970s, I read at almost one sitting The Erl King (translated by Barbara Bray). It was all because of a newspaper review. From its first page the novel's breadth and depth of seriousness was in glaring contrast with what passed for English fiction in those days. The gulf widened to an unimaginable distance when I read Proust (two floors above the street, Holland Park): Scott Moncrieff's "Edwardian" translation in pale blue. Isn't it the richest in language and thought, therefore the most complete novel - even in translation? About 12 years later I read the Kilmartin version in an East Balmain terrace house.

It took almost the entire 33 days in a container ship from Melbourne to La Spezia to read the essays of Montaigne (translator, MA Screech), because I spent most of the time sitting with the German captain, who said, among other things, that he never failed to take on his long sea voyages something by his favourite writer, Adalbert Stifter, the Austrian novelist who wrote ornate stories extolling rural values. I only remember Walter Benjamin's One Way Street because it became wet in the tropics, in a boat somewhere on the Rajang River, past Kapit. Borges' Ficciones I picked up at a friend's house in Madras. In 1989, when I finally entered Timbuktu -tremendous heat and all that - I had in my bag one of Balzac's finest, Lost Illusions, constantly wiping sand from its pages. The fabled city surrounded by sand, and built of sand, appeared as an illusion.

The amazing novels of Raymond Roussel posed a danger to a young writer living in London, surrounded by grey rubbish bins and the worn-out realism of English fiction: beware of creating situations, however imaginative and lively, out of thin air.

Notebooks and journals normally are to one side of the main path of literature. In European hands they flourish. But why? By their journals and notebooks alone Gide, Stendhal, Musil, Gombrowicz would be major figures, and along with the usual Russians - ferocious note-takers and diarists - have few equivalents in English literature, aside from Virginia Woolf.

Similarly, the Europeans have produced garrulous autobiographies - supreme examples: Berlioz, Canetti, Bernhard; whereas the Anglo-Saxon strength appears to be more at arm's-length - biography.

Below and parallel to the authors they translate, the names of some translators become permanent fixtures, like pilot-fish alongside whales. Their names are smaller, faceless. Does anyone know what Constance Garnett looks like? Did she frown or squint? Smile? Had she ever set foot in Russia? I would like to see Barbara Bray's face. What does Sophie Wilkins look like? It was through the efforts of Ralph Manheim and William Weaver that I was long ago introduced to Günter Grass and Calvino.

My first copy of Madame Bovary, an old American hardback, had been translated, it was later explained, by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, which was perhaps why, the expert mysteriously suggested, her name was not acknowledged by the publisher. And yet the rather weird Temptation of St Anthony, given on my 40th birthday by a friend from the English department of Sydney University, is also without the translator's name. It gives the impression Flaubert was some sort of Englishman, which of course is ridiculous.

Not to read in translation -unimaginable, almost unforgivable. A lopsided view of the world. Nevertheless, some readers - serious readers - look down at their shoes and explain that a translation is a maimed result; it cannot have the intended power of the original. Better to avoid it. Far better. There are plenty of other things in our own language. "To read a work in translation is like kissing a beautiful woman with a handkerchief over her face," observed Vissarion Belinsky. He must be talking about poetry. There is the Bible. And less direct, the continuing deep presence of the Greeks.

· Anna Karenina, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.